This post contains material from Dr. Pierce’s blog, https://piscience.wordpress.com/, written after his India trip in 2016.

A common question upon returning from my trip concerned the food. Fortunately (for me, anyway), we ate at the monastery hotel and not the typical monk fare. I’m sure I could’ve handled the food the monks ate, which was just a vegetarian rice served in mass quantities.

The breakfasts every day were the same and very good. They contained a fried dough that was pita-like, an egg soup with some potato, and a semi-spicy potato dish. There were also boiled eggs and bread with condiments, but I stuck to something that looks like the picture below. I went with the black tea (no milk!) and juice, and dipping that bread in the soup and using it to pick up the potatoes was ridiculously tasty.

The lunches and dinners varied, and we went out to eat Tibetan/Chinese food at a restaurant one night and Indian food another. Unfortunately I didn’t play the part of the obnoxious American, taking pictures of the food, but I was able to find something close on Google. The lunches and dinners at the hotel in the monastery usually consisted of a variety of vegetable dishes and tingmo, the Tibetan Steamed bread shown below. After eating it for a couple days, though, I couldn’t handle it anymore (not sure why, maybe it was too bland?) so I went with just a couple veggie dishes for lunch.

www.mightysweet.com

The best Tibetan dish I had was momos, which are fried or steamed dumplings with veggies or meat inside. They are served with a spicy condiment, like the one below, and the fried ones have that crispy outside and savory middle — just fantastic. We were told that “traditional Tibetan food” wasn’t very good, consisting of raw meat among other things, and the food that we were served was more of a Tibetan/Chinese hybrid. Whatever it was, it was outstanding.

jdmesh.com

We stopped several times for Indian food, which included masalas, biryani, paneer, and tandoori. All served with delicious naan and all delicious. I’ll spare the internet pictures on these (as they are fairly ubiquitous now in the US) and just show my first dish, a masala omelette. I wasn’t super ambitious, taking the advice of Emory’s TravelWell and avoiding any raw fruit or vegetables that have edible skin. I didn’t get sick except for some stomach issues that I curbed quick with Imodium AD, so I’d keep this strategy in the future. The food was a highlight of the trip, though, and I’m salivating for those fried momos as I write. Maybe I’ll try to make them soon!

This post contains material from Dr. Pierce’s blog, https://piscience.wordpress.com/, written after his India trip in 2016.

I was under the misconception that the monastery just housed monks. Not only do many non-monk Tibetan exiles live around the monastic settlement, but there are a many children who go to school at the monastery. The school-age children have the traditional robes and shaved heads, like the monks. What families send these children to the monastery? Remember, many Tibetans are living in exile in various parts of India. Traditionally, every first born Tibetan son is sent to become a monk (while daughters can become nuns), as early as age five, though this is not the case for every family. In my understanding of the Buddhist tradition, the body is a vessel for the spirit, and therefore it is viewed as a great honor to join the monastery. This monastic life is ultimately a choice, however, and monks or nuns are allowed to leave at any time.

I’m not sure how many children are going to school at Sera Jey, but I’d guess it’s in the thousands.  The school website is really interesting, especially the highlighted student work on the lefthand side — fair warning, though, some of the stories are heart-wrenching.

serajeschool.net

The children students learn a traditional Buddhist curriculum, and have a very regimented schedule (see below). Debates are a large part of the curriculum, though it is not a traditional Western debate with a winner and loser; rather, debates are designed as an opportunity to share knowledge — I’ll address debates more in an additional post.

serajeschool.net

My first day at the monastery was also the day off for the children (and the monastery as a whole). Looking out of my room, I could see lots of children playing in the courtyard — it wasn’t hard to imagine my son joining in the games they were inventing!

This post contains material from Dr. Pierce’s blog, https://piscience.wordpress.com/, written after his India trip in 2016.

he Sera Jey Monastery where Chris Beck (my teaching partner) and I stayed was about 50 miles west of Mysore in Southern India. The Sera Jey monastery itself is actually one of three monasteries in a concentrated area a short distance from the first camp (I’ll describe this setup in a future post).

This settlement consists of many buildings including a guest house, where we stayed, which had very nice rooms for us.

While I’ve heard that there is a lack of green space in some of the urban areas in India, this was not the case in and around the monastery.  There was a very lush courtyard just outside the monastery hotel and tons of farmland in the immediate area. Google Maps shows that there is a large area of forest beyond the farmland, but I didn’t explore that far (next time!)

The monasteries house thousands of monks and school age boys, and therefore consists of dormitories, temples, teaching areas, shops, etc.

Our main lecture room was almost across the hall from our dorm rooms and the meals were served right above us in an open air part of the hotel.  Amazingly (to me anyway), we had very good internet access except for the three or so hour-long daily electrical blackouts.  By no means did we live the monastic life, but it was nice having accustomed comforts!

This post contains material from Dr. Pierce’s blog, https://piscience.wordpress.com/, written after his India trip in 2016.

So . . . how did the Tibetan-monks-learning-science-thing come about?

I imagine it starts with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who started the Mind & Life Institute with scientists through Dialogues and Meetings that started in 1987. I was told that prior to this alliance between Tibetan Buddhism and Western scientists, the Tibetan monks had a traditional Buddhist curriculum that remained unchanged for over 600 years.  This traditional curriculum is largely spiritual and not in concert with the principal discoveries of “Western science”.  The beauty of the Dalai Lama’s initiative is his encouragement of the monks to understand Western science as a compliment to Buddhism, with an openness to science’s empirical findings and a rejection of dogma that should inspire all science/religion discussions.

How did this Dialogue manifest itself into something tangible?

The Emory Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI), was founded through coordination between Geshe Lhakdor, Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, and Emory University’s Dean Robert Paul.  This started as a 5-year program at a Tibetan monastery in Dharamsala, India and has since expanded to three monasteries in Southern India.  The program relies on monks learning Western science during the year, with reinforcement by US instructors (from Emory, mostly) during team-taught week-long sessions of four subjects: philosophy of science, biology, neuroscience, and physics.  The program in this iteration will go for the next five years, with 2014 being the pilot session in the three new monasteries, resulting in hundreds of monks with a further understanding of these subjects. Here’s a 2009 NY Times article that explains the program more.